So, If you have been following the news in the US and the disruptive Trump administration you would have heard that Trump has decided to Ban funding for all gain of function research going forward. I must say, that was the first time in a very long time I heard that phrase.
I learnt about the possibility of such kind of research as a medical student studying biochemistry and pathology in school... I didn't think it was something that people were already doing at the time. I was a naïve medical student and all I wanted to do was pass my exams, expanding my knowledge base was only a bonus.
But what exactly is "gain of function research?
Imagine you are a farmer with 10, 000 chickens in your poultry farm, and suddenly one day, you find out that some of your chickens have fallen sick. You call the vet who runs some tests and tell you that they have been infected with a virus. You ask the vet doctor if there is any cure and he tells you that there is none. In 2 weeks you have lost over 1000 chickens to this virus. You are desperate and praying that this virus does not hit any other chickens that you have.
Then suddenly, you notice that one of your workers has fallen ill with a really bad flu. You take him to the hospital and the doctor runs a lot of tests and find out that he has been infected with a virus. A virus that is similar to the one that attacked your chickens. What could have happened?
The doctor tells you that the virus must have undergone some form of mutation to enable it infect a human being.
But what if you could stay ahead of the virus? What if you could predict the kind of mutation that the virus would undergo and get yourself prepared for it? What if you could take the virus that infected your chickens, examine it in the lab, look for it's flaws and structure and create a stronger and more potent form of the virus in the lab in other to study how it would affect people and develop a cure for it?
Well, that is what gain of function research is all about. It is about making almost harmless organisms more potential dangerous and deadly in the hopes that they can be contained and studied to generate a cure, in case they ever happen to come up in the wild.
So, in a way, gain of function research is a gamble. It is spending a lot of money to generate what could potentially end the human race in the hopes that nothing would go wrong and you can produce a cure for it.
I know I have oversimplified it, but I think that is what gain of function research entails in a nutshell.
I am sure you can already see the problem with that. What if you cannot contain the newly engineered virus? What if the virus falls into the hands of someone with malicious intent? What if you are unable to find a cure?
How it can all go to shits
There is a lot of ways that things can go really wrong with this kind of research, and many people are of the opinion that this is what happened with the covid19 pandemic. The lab in Wuhan was probably conducting gain of function research to improve the transmissibility of the SARs COV-2 Virus and it somehow got out of hand.
I do not know if that is true, I do not know if it is factual, but it is certainly very convincing.
So, it makes sense to see why Trump has decided to ban this kind of research.
Does this mean that this research would stop completely? It is highly unlikely. There would be other countries and other people who would continue to carry out this kind of research because even though it is a very dangerous research to carryout, it does provide us with insights into how organisms change and how they affect humans.
What do you think?
should gain of function research be banned worldwide?